Back in 2018 I decided to see what all the fuzz about the macOS was and spent just under a $1,000 to buy a MacBook Air. As I wrote back then, that was my first Apple product since I migrated from Apple System 8 to Linux in the 1990s. Was I impressed? Yes and no, but that’s a different story. I’ll stick to the topic of the MacBook Air and its battery.
As you can see from Figure 2, the system is reporting that “the battery’s capacity is significantly reduced”. That’s a slight understatement, because the battery can only power the unit for just about 20 minutes. And that’s after I did the Shift-Control-Alt-Power key ritual. That means in less than 4 years, the battery of my MacBook Air is effectively dead. Since I bought my first laptop (a Fujitsu) in 2001, this is the first laptop whose battery gave up before I either gave the unit away or bought a new one.
Keep in mind that it’s not even my main computer. It mainly serves, since I don’t use a smartphone, as my road machine: I take it to the Temple once a week (on Sundays), to the occasional meeting with client’s at nearby restaurants, etc. I also use it to watch movies at home, when I’m partially working on my main computer. That’s all the use it gets.
Figure 2: Status info of my MacBook Air battery.
Meanwhile, the battery on that main computer, a Dell Inspiron 15 5000 Series laptop, which currently runs Linux Mint Cinnamon and which I bought at about the same time as the MacBook Air, is still going strong. Since any service option will likely cost me more than I’m willing to pay, it’s highly unlikely that I take the MacBook Air for servicing. So I’ll just continue using it with the power adapter.
And since I’m tired of macOS anyway, the MacBook Air is about to become host to a Linux distribution. Hopefully I can get that done within the next week or so.
